Ministry in the Middle

Like many Americans, I paid close attention to the public Senate hearings regarding allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  While I could not watch the hearings in their entirety, I watched or listened to roughly half of the proceedings. That was more than enough to find the entire conversation demoralizing.  While many of those involved paid lip service to seeking truth, mostly it was an exercise in political warfare, pitting one side against another.  Both Republicans and Democrats railed against the questionable tactics of the other side related to hiding or revealing evidence and rushing or slowing the process. Others have written extensively about the increasing tribalism in our culture, in politics and beyond.  Without question, this tribalism stretches into the church as well.  We join our teams and we stick by them.  We circle the wagons when others threaten or challenge someone in our own tribe....

The church, we are told, is shrinking.  Statistics suggest that overall American church membership is declining, sometimes drastically.  In most of our congregations, we see the decline.  There are fewer people in the pews and fewer people participating.  In most congregations, this becomes painfully obvious once a year when leaders begin to prepare the next year's budget and nominate the next year's officers.  Financial support of the church lags behind the expenses of the church, creating pressure to cut programs, cut outreach giving, or even cut staff time or positions.  There never seem to be many new options for officer position, forcing people to keep serving again and again... and again, and sometimes requiring people to serve in multiple capacities to keep programs going. In the season of planning, it is easy to lament that our church is too small.  If we just had a few more people and more reliable financial giving, things would be easier ...

In the past few days, the news has been dominated by an anonymous editorial written by "a senior official in the Trump administration."   It suggests that many people appointed by the president are working to protect the country from the president's "worst inclinations."  Like many people, I have found the entire affair fascinating, though I recognize there are some rather horrifying implications to the op-ed and some of its details. One paragraph caught my eye, not only for its political implications, but for a trend in behavior that I have often observed in church settings. Given the instability witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president.  But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.  So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over. Presumably, people who have the...

This summer, the elders in my congregation and I have exchanged a specific piece of the worship service that we lead.  Since before I began serving as senior minister in this congregation, the pastor has been responsible for providing a short meditation before Communion each week.  This summer, each of them has had the opportunity to offer this meditation/invitation to the Lord's Table.  In exchange, I provided an offering meditation and prayer for the gifts offered -- typically something that the elders have led. In our denominational tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Communion is the centerpiece of worship.  In key ways, it represents the heart of our shared theology of Christ's presence in our midst, of radical grace and acceptance, of the teaching of the New Testament about the centrality of the Lord's Supper and Baptism.  Personally, I love the chance to reflect on part of what it means for us to gather and share Communion in the name...

Last week, the Pennsylvania attorney general released a grand jury report detailing credible accusations implicating more than 300 Roman Catholic priests in sexually abusing more than 1000 children since the 1940s.  As in other parts of the church, bishops and other church leaders protected the priests, downplaying and ignoring accusations of abuse and misconduct. This news provides more opportunities for outrage about people who should have accepted responsibility and done things differently.  Priests, those entrusted with sharing and teaching about the love of God and Jesus, perverting that message into a weapon for pursuing their own selfish desires through abuse and rape.  Church leaders, who were entrusted with holding priests to account for their behavior, but who instead protected their friends and colleagues behind a wall of silence and a tendency to simply move accused priests to other parishes.  Police and prosecutors who felt powerless to question the a...

"Come as you are.  The Lord welcomes us just as we are." Almost every time that I offer a meditation or invitation before Communion, I end with these words.  In part, I feel they reflect the radical grace of Jesus, which is celebrated in the Lord's Supper, even though we do not entirely grasp the full meaning of this radical grace and love.  In part, I hope that we as church can slowly grow to live out the promise of such a radical grace. I thought about this invitation again as I read a recent article about "Crying in Worship" in The Christian Century .  The author, Heidi Haverkamp, is an Episcopal priest who I met when we overlapped as students at the University of Chicago Divinity School.  In the essay, she admitted that she had often told others that it was okay to cry in church, but she had a different appreciation when she attended a worship service and cried. Now, those who have been around me when I lead worship services know that I don't need ...

N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography  (HarperOne, 2018) , 480 pages Noted scholar N. T. Wright attempts to present a unified portrait of the apostle Paul in this new biography.  Drawing heavily on the New Testament letters of Paul and book of Acts, Wright argues that Paul was passionate and consistent in his life-long faith in God.  Further, he argues that Paul's missionary teaching forms the backbone of all subsequent theology. Wright's central thesis is that Paul had a consistent overall theology throughout his life, from before his famous encounter on the road to Damascus until his death.  Repeatedly, he suggests that Paul's "conversion" did not offer any new insight into God except that the promised Messiah had come and was Jesus of Nazareth. The great benefit of this approach is that it strives to see unity in Paul's theology, linking his rabbinical education to his subsequent thought.  One could argue that Paul himself alludes to this unity in his lette...